Discover the taste of solidarity and community in every cup of AgroEco Coffee
What is the taste of solidarity and community in your cup of coffee? CAN opens its coffee tastings with this question, generating dialogue about the history, production, and consumption of coffee with students, teachers, and enthusiastic coffee drinkers along California’s Central Coast. AgroEco Coffee is part of a global effort to create solidarity economies that prioritize the reproduction of life and livelihoods instead of profit. We believe that AgroEco Coffee’s flavor profile emerges from our network’s shared values of transparency, cooperation, and environmental care.
A cup of AgroEco begins in the coffee forests of San Ramón, Nicaragua, and Ixhuatlán del Café, Veracruz, Mexico, where campesino families are organized into small cooperatives. They cultivate coffee alongside bananas, oranges, medicinal plants, and timber trees while nurturing microorganisms to regenerate soil fertility. These practices create microclimates that bring forth specific notes of butter, citrus, chocolate, nuts, or cherries that can be enjoyed in every sip.
The meticulous process of seed selection, cultivation, harvesting, drying, and storage of coffee reveals a culture of community work rooted in principles of solidarity and cooperation. Furthermore, CAN, roasting partners Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company and Honeymoon Coffee, importing partner ETICO, and coffee cooperatives UCA San Ramón and Campesinos en la Lucha Agraria/VIDA A.C., meet regularly to negotiate prices and share knowledge with each other South and North. Each action is a node in a network of solidarity that seeks to strengthen dignified livelihoods and the struggle for food sovereignty.
AgroEco Coffee’s direct trade approach guarantees better prices than the conventional market, averaging about 30% above Fair Trade. In addition, every pound purchased contributes to the Sustainable Agriculture Fund and the Women’s Unpaid Labor Fund, both of which are collectively managed by the coffee farmers themselves.
Coffee tastings are an important node that supports Agroeco’s production process and ongoing work to uphold a solidarity economy. CAN seeks to generate profound reflection in the North about the troubled history of coffee production embedded in the conventional market, and has recently facilitated coffee tastings in seminars at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, and in collaboration with the Crossroad of Culture Coffee Club at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Each tasting brings consumers closer to the work of coffee-growing families, where each cup of coffee becomes a bridge between cultures and values, allowing for dialogue about solidarity coffee. An alternative path is traced, one that embraces the local wisdom of small farmers and moves away from the simple monetary exchange of beans.
In each cup of AgroEco coffee, taste is more than a sensory experience; it is a tangible manifestation of solidarity and community that flows from producer to consumer, creating a meaningful bond that transcends the act of drinking coffee.
Learn more about AgroEco’s coffee tasting on Crossroad of Culture Coffee Club Instagram!
Enjoy a cup of AgroEco Coffee at the Aptos Farmers Market every Saturday from 8-12 pm or in downtown Santa Cruz at Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company
